ABSTRACT
Several years ago I was asked to speak about my German version of a stage adaptation of Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting to a translation research forum at the University of Oxford. Here is a passage from that talk that provoked some debate:
As far as I can make out, the complex issue of humour has frequently been neglected in productions [of the German version] ... with a pronounced tendency among directors and actors, themselves engaged in a type of translation — and possibly flattered by the social and political topicality of the drugs issue, to play down what might be referred to as the 'Rabelaisian' aspects of the work in a well-meaning attempt to expose the subject's harrowing core. In this context, it is perhaps worth remembering just how far away from the original text a stage adaptation can 'stray', and for reasons that may be quite beyond the translator's control. The complexity of a stage performance owes much to the composite structuring of the material in a series of interlinked, collaborative and exploitative processes, reflecting the specific, and always dynamic, juncture of aesthetic, social and commercial interests. Ideally, then, if we are to speak of the translation of the text from its Scottish setting to the German stage milieu, it would be necessary to analyse the full spectrum of formative influences on the text at different stages of the process. One source of factors that generally remains outwith the translator's grasp is the way in which the theatre itself, both in a specific sense (directors, actors, stage designers, rehearsals etc.) and in its traditions (aesthetic, literary, social, local, historical), is brought to bear on the text with each new performance, so that the process even of textual translation is never fully concluded. For it is rare that a production can afford to have a translator on hand, contributing advice to actors and director on the consequences of the textual changes frequently made during rehearsals, or in the course of a season's exposure to the rigours or performance.
One might expect the ensuing discussion to have centred on the manner in which humour — the grotesqueries of Trainspotting, for example — can be attenuated or lost altogether in that complex and prolonged process of 'translation' to which dramatic texts are generally subjected. However, if the passage I have just cited proved contentious (and it was not intended to be so), this had less to do with problems of translation per se, than with the vexed question of textual authority, and, by implication, with the authority 'accruing' to the translation, or to the translator as author's advocate. How, I was asked, could I allow anyone to tamper with my 94translation once I had considered it finished? Is it not the very task of the translator to ensure that the closest possible rendering of an authors text be heard in the target language? Further, and by logical extension, is it not the translator's job to resist all intermeddling on the part of dramaturges and directors?